Vastralaya

Evan Shively (Perseus271)

Edgar Colt

Vitor Miguel

Prisma Soulstorm

Serena

Jordan

Bruna Guedes

Husain Kothari

FRNK

Uendi Prifti

Abdul Hasib

A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profund as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

STOP. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands. NO, don't put it down. It's too late. They're watching you. My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye. The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.The important thing is this: The drug is called Soy Sauce and it gives users a window into another dimension. John and I never had the chance to say no. You still do. I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind: \
  None of this was my fault.\


No, I didn’t kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn’t dump the body in the station mall.When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people—who knew?)Yes, the unthinkable is about to happen: Murderbot must voluntarily speak to humans!Again!

Murderbot returns in its highly-anticipated, first, full-length standalone novel.You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot.Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you’ll read this century.—I’m usually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action.Drastic action it is, then.

It has a dark past – one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more.Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue.What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…

Everyone has a white whale of reading. An El Dorado in paper and ink that they seek, usually fruitlessly, across the many books they read, whether they even know it or not. Maybe it’s a novel that makes you feel so much, that you tear up. Maybe a story that expands your mind so much that you can only mouth a silent ‘wow’ when you turn the last page. Maybe you, like me, are looking for an epic novel in an awe inspiring setting that also makes you laugh – my personal white whale.Anyway, I have a couple of unlikely treasures I seek in my reading, and when I finished The Engineer Reconditioned I knew I had found one of my personal grails, that most rare of things - A science fiction short story collection with no duds. No bum notes. Not even a merely average story, one of the anaemic but still serviceable filler tales of the sort so frequently tacked onto compilation books.Every story in this collection is solid. Every story.I can’t remember the last time I encountered that in a short story collection. Usually in an average collection there are flashes of brilliance, a handful of good stories and one or two whose weakness stinks the whole collection up - the long-dead fish under the floorboards of an otherwise lovely home.From page one, Asher inducts his reader into fascinating universes. The first two stories here are connected to Asher’s ‘Polity’ universe – a world I’m now very keen to explore in his novels.The first story, The Engineer, is very cool. It’s big SF, with gigantic dreadnoughts, ancient alien races, and the highest of stakes. It has the feel of golden age SF about it, but with a modern sensibility and some damn fine writing behind it. It’s a bloody good story, and well worth your time.Snairls is as completely different to The Engineer as could be, a story set on a gigantic floating snail populated with gene-modified people who we see from the view of a man who has been indentured to a hive-mind comprised of garden-variety hornets. It’s weird, gross and intriguing all at the same time.Following from this, Spatterjay is another riot of biological weirdness that takes place in a different one of Asher’s regular settings, a strange world infested with symbiotic parasites that alter everything they come into contact with. We follow a crew of semi-humans who sail a deadly sea with a baseline human researcher trying to understand how they can survive in such a hostile place. Three of the final four stories are set in Asher’s ‘Owner’ universe – on a world that is owned and controlled by a being who has reached a superior plane of existence – a man who has become almost a god. This man has allowed humans to live on his world, but only if they follow several simple rules, banning them from entering certain places, hunting certain beasts, over-exploiting resources or growing their population beyond a certain number. Should these rules be broken the Owner’s automatons dish out brutal correction, and the interplay between the capriciousness and greed of humanity and the owners rules make for a very interesting backdrop to a trio of fascinating and entertaining stories.This isn’t to say this is a perfect collection, that every story is a masterpiece. The Tor Beast’s Prison isn’t quite as strong as the others, but it’s still a fine story, told tightly and well, in a way that grabs you and keeps you guessing. In a lesser collection it would rank somewhere in the middle, but it’s the weaker gazelle in this flock of limber, lithe antelope.Dipping briefly into Asher’s fully realized worlds - worlds he has devoted multiple entire novels to - is great fun, and filled me with a delicious sense of anticipation. It felt kind of like reading Alistair Reynold’s Galactic North, without having read any of his novels. The short stories here give you a taste of an amazing universe, followed by the realization that you have several fantastic full length novels to enjoy in the same vein – the faintly buzzing future echoes of hours of reading pleasure carrying back to the present.Neal Asher is a hell of a storyteller. I’m very keen to explore the rest of his work, and if it’s of as high a quality as the stories in The Engineer Reconditioned then I think I may have a new go-to writer, the kind of author whose books both relax and elate you when you open their covers – both from the knowledge you are in safe hands and the certainty that those hands will show you a hell of a good time. Now that I’ve found a near-perfect SF short story compilation I really only have one task left to me. All that remains for me to do before retiring from reading is to find an SF novel with the scope of Dune, the imagination of Hyperion and the wit of Iain M. Banks – when I’ve found that my quest for the best in Science Fiction will be complete. I’m hoping it will take many years and hundreds of books, numerous of which I expect to have been written by Neal Asher.Five white whales out of five.

During a war between two planets in the same solar system - each occupied by adapted humans - what is thought to be a cosmic superstring is discovered. After being cut, this object collapses into four cylindrical pieces, each about the size of a tube train. Each is densely packed with either alien technology or some kind of life. They are placed for safety in three ozark cylinders of a massively secure space station. There a female research scientist subsequently falls pregnant, and gives birth to quads. Then she commits suicide - but why? By the end of the war one of the contesting planets has been devastated by the hilldiggers - giant space dreadnoughts employing weapons capable of creating mountain ranges. The quads have meanwhile grown up and are assuming positions of power in the post-war society. One of them will eventually gain control of the awesome hilldiggers ...

The Polity Collective is the pinnacle of space-faring civilization. Academic and insightful, its dominion stretches from Earth Central into the unfathomable reaches of the galactic void. But when the Polity finally encounters alien life in the form of massive, hostile, crab-like carnivores known as the Prador, there can be only one outcome — total warfare! Starships clash, planets fall, and space stations are overrun, but for Jebel Krong and Moria Salem, two unlikely heroes trapped at the center of the action, this war is far more than a mere clash of cultures, far more than technology versus brute force... this war is personal.

Set in a future where the United States has largely broken down into reluctantly cooperating enclaves run by a wide variety of strongmen and warlords, with a veneer of government control that seems largely interested in controlling technology. Dr. Adder is an artist-surgeon, who modifies sexual organs of his patients to satisfy the weirdest of perversion; he is clearly depicted as a partly criminal, partly countercultural figure in a future Los Angeles.

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author--"an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)--offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.    A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own lives: as a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.   What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as--simply because--it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, as a theme played--on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key--by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.   At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic. 

Welcome to the new interface.Channel SK1N tells the story of Nola Blue: pop prodigy, the girl every teen wants to be, or be with. She has talent, hit tunes, international fame, everything she could possibly want. But when she begins to pick up TV signals on her skin, Nola is forced on a journey far beyond the boundaries of the mega-stardom she was moulded for.This is a Frankenstein tale for the X-Factor Generation. Saturated with the same parasitic media that prey on Nola, Channel SK1N broadcasts Noon’s lyrical mastery on a viral frequency.

Johnny is a courier. He carries other people's memories, millions of them, downloaded into his brain... Working out of Beijing, he is hired to carry a package to the States. The hundreds of gigabytes stashed in his head are far beyond his capacity, but as long as he gets downloaded quickly they won't do him any permanent harm...But headaches are the least of Johnny's problems. The Americans aren't the only ones who want the data. The Yakuza are after Johnny too. Not all of him, though. All they need is his cryogenically frozen head...In Johnny Mnemonic, the science-fiction guru of our age brings his acid-drenched tale of the near future to the screen for the first time. Containing William Gibson's original short story, his full script and exclusive stills from the film, this classic of the cyberpunk era expresses the unique vision of the author who was the first to see his way into tomorrow...

In Ballard's hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010's New York Times–bestselling Zero History.Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there's a job he's supposed to do—a job Flynne didn't know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He's supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That's all there is to it. He's offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn't what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.

In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hard way. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he’s available…for a price.For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can’t refuse.The 200-year-old “godfather” of the Budayeen’s underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.Wry, savage, and unignorable, When Gravity Fails was hailed as a classic by Effinger’s fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of “Marid Audrian” novels it begins were the culmination of his career.

Before email, before “the web,” before hackers and GPS and sexting, before titanium implants, before Google Goggles, before Siri, and before each and every one of us carried a computer in our pockets, there was cyberpunk, and science fiction was never the same.Cyberpunk writers—serious, smart, and courageous in the face of change—exposed the naiveté of a society rushing headlong into technological unknowns. Technology could not save us, they argued, and it might in fact ruin us. Now, thirty years after The Movement party-crashed the science fiction scene, the cyberpunk reality has largely come to be. The future they imagined is here.In this book, you’ll find stories by legendary cyberpunk authors like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, as well as stories by new cyberpunk voices like Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Lethem. You’ll find stories about society gone wrong and society saved, about soulless humans and soulful machines, about futures worth fighting for and futures that do nothing but kill. Welcome to your cyberpunk world.

"A low crime-rate doctor," she told him amiably, "is a sure sign of social deprivation."Anthony Royal built the Titanic of skyscrapers.  \
  \
A state of the art, megalithic structure suitable for 2,000 tenants. It is a self-contained environment with everything a tenant would need such as shopping or exercise or even schools for their kids. The people the building attracts are white collar, well educated, professionals. The apartments sell out quickly and as everyone start to settle into their new lives glitches start to occur. Despite the developing problems entire floor parties are standard weekend entertainment. A bottle drops from a higher floor and shatters on Dr. Robert Laing's balcony and it is equivalent to the first canon fired on Fort Sumter. As the week continues more bottles are dropped and other assorted trash begins to fall from the sky. A rich jeweler plummets from his upper level apartment onto the roof of a car. Resentment is building between levels. The perceived richest people, where Anthony Royal resides, are on the upper levels. The middle level people, where Dr. Robert Laing reside, are resentful of the upper levels, but also becoming more disdainful of the lower levels. Richard Wilder, a man working on a documentary about human behavior, lives in the lower levels. The trash is accumulating on the ground floor, the trash chutes become jammed and more and more trash is being hoisted over the side of the building creating an intolerable situation for the lower tenants. Electricity winks out leaving entire floors without power for days at a time. "Five floors were without electricity. At night the dark bands stretched across the face of the high-rise like dead strata in a fading brain."The air condition goes out and when it does come back on it only trickles out for a few minutes before failing again. The lower levels bear the worst of the malfunctions with the upper levels remaining relatively unaffected. Resentments build and as tenants become more and more irritated the civilized structure of the building starts to erode. This is the point of the novel when J.G. Ballard asks the reader to suspend belief. Yes, he is creepy; and yes, he has a pink beach ball; and yes, he wants to play with your mind. \
  \
The three levels of the building go to war with each other. People are beaten. Women are raped. Graffiti is sprayed on the walls. The building breaks down into tribal units with lower levels trying to conquer and take over higher levels of the building. "Not for the fist time Laing reflected that he and his neighbors were eager for trouble as the most effective means of enlarging their sex lives.The problem I have is that the outside world is perfectly normal. Civilization is existing just fine. There is no cataclysmic event that has ruptured the natural order of things. To return to the world of order is as simple as leaving the building. These are highly educated people who have benefited greatly from living in a society that allows them to make money using their brains. I found it hard to believe that these people would so easily transition to a tribal warfare society. "They discussed the latest ruses for obtaining food and women, for defending the upper floors against marauders, their plans for alliance and betrayal. Now the new order had emerged, in which all life within the high-rise revolved around three obsessions-security, food and sex."This is the adults gone wild version of Lord of the Flies. I didn't like Lord of the Flies so maybe I just don't like books about mob culture. Ballard didn't sell me on this concept, not that I don't believe that intelligent, well educated people are incapable of marinating in the swamp juices of the lizard brain, but I didn't feel it would happen under the circumstances that Ballard presented. I am still curious to explore more in Ballard's world and I look forward to reading more of his work. I'll leave you with some parting thoughts from Doctor Laing."Would he soon be the last person alive in the high-rise? He thought of himself in this enormous building, free to roam its floors and concrete galleries, to climb its silent elevator shafts, to sit by himself in turn on every one of its thousand balconies. This dream, longed for since his arrival at the high-rise, suddenly unnerved him, almost as if, at last alone here, he had heard footsteps in the next room and come face to face with himself."If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

With his vivid, stylized prose, cyberpunk intensity, and seemingly limitless imagination, Jack Womack has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut - though Gibson admits, "If you dropped the characters from Neuromancer into Womack's Manhattan, they'd fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns". Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Womack's fifth novel, is a thrilling, hysterical, and eerily disturbing piece ot work. Lola Hart is an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. She comes from a comfortable family, attends an exclusive private school, loves her friends Lori and Katherine, teases her sister Boob. But in the increasingly troubled city where she lives (a near-future Manhattan) she is a dying breed. Riots, fire, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, increasing inflation, political and civil unrest all threaten her way of life, as well as the very fabric of New York City. In her diary, Lola chronicles the changes she and her family make as they attempt to adjust to a city, and a country, that is spinning out of control. Her mother is a teacher, but no one is hiring. Her father is a writer, but no one is buying his scripts. Hounded by creditors and forced to vacate their apartment and move to Harlem, her family, and her life, begins to dissolve. Increasingly estranged from her privileged school friends, Lola soon makes new ones: Iz, Jude, and Weezie - wise veterans of the street who know what must be done in order to survive and are more than willing to do it. And the metamorphosis of Lola Hart, who is surrounded by the new language and violence of the streets, begins. Simultaneously chilling and darkly hilarious, Random Acts of Senseless Violence takes the jittery urban fears we suppress, both in fiction and in daily life, and makes them explicit - and explicitly terrifying.--Publisher/Powells.com

First published in 1962, J.G. Ballard's mesmerizing and ferociously prescient novel imagines a terrifying future in which solar radiation and global warming have melted the polar ice caps and Triassic-era jungles have overrun a submerged and tropical London. Set during the year 2145, the novel follows biologist Dr. Robert Kerans and his team of scientists as they confront a surreal cityscape populated by giant iguanas, albino alligators, and endless swarms of malarial insects. Nature has swallowed all but a few remnants of human civilization, and, slowly, Kerans and his companions are transformed—both physically and psychologically—by this prehistoric environment. Echoing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness—complete with a mad white hunter and his hordes of native soldiers—this "powerful and beautifully clear" (Brian Aldiss) work becomes a thrilling adventure and a haunting examination of the effects of environmental collapse on the human mind.

Racing across the country from L.A. to New York, a plethora of exotic cars carry contestants hoping to win a very large sum.

Roger Mortis and Doug Bigelow are cops that are chasing crooks that are dead serious about crime. Or should I say they are chasing dead crooks perpetrating serious crimes? Seems some nutcase has learned how to bring back the dead and is sending them on crime sprees. Now these indestructable goons are in the way of officers Mortis and Bigelow. To even things up, when Mortis is killed (in the line of duty, of course) he gets a jump start from the Resurrection machine and takes the fight to the zombie bad guys.

Karate-kicking midgets! Paper-mache monsters! Busty babes with blades! Filipino genre films of the '70s and '80s had it all. Boasting cheap labour, exotic scenery and non-existent health and safety regulations, the Philippines was a dreamland for exploitation filmmakers whose renegade productions were soon engulfing drive-in screens around the globe like a tidal schlock-wave! At last, the all-too-often overlooked world of drive-in filler from Manilla gets the Mark Hartley (NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD) treatment in Machete Maidens Unleashed! This is the ultimate insiders' account of a faraway backlot where stunt men came cheap, plot was obsolete and the make-up guy was packing heat! Machete Maidens Unleashed! features interviews with cult movie icons Roger Corman, Joe Dante, John Landis, Sid Haig, Eddie Romero and a large assembly of cast, crew and critics, each with a jaw-dropping story to tell about filmmaking with no budget, no scruples, no boundaries and - more often than not - no clothes. Strap yourselves in - and join us for a non-stop Filipino femme-fest, all the way from the jungles of the Pacific via the trash cans of the critics!

Soichi Negishi is a shy young musician who dreams of a career in pop. Dreams don't pay the bills, so he's ended up as the lead singer and guitarist of a death metal band, "Detroit Metal City". In stage costume he is Johannes Krauser II, rumored to be a terrorist demon from hell, to have killed and raped his parents, to wield his giant death penis with abandon, and other menacing tales being said about him after each public performance. The songs of DMC often encourage the audience to engage in immoral and illegal behavior, such as rape or murder, or tell of Krauser's exploits with similar actions, in a parody of the genre. Negishi despises DMC and all that it stands for, but he can't walk away as he has a talent to play the psychotic frontman of the band. Negishi is under his meager exterior a Rageaholic and also is very skilled in his guitar play. Further, he feels obligation to the rest of the band and his label and even if he manages to escape, he is invariably being roped back in by the manager of the band's label. The Krauser persona also functions as an outlet to vent his frustration over his failing personal career, which has not advanced beyond him being a street musician. Playing his music in the street earns him nothing but the disapproval of bystanders over his cheesy pop songs. Negishi is envious of the popularity DMC and his Krauser persona enjoy in contrast to the music he actually wants to play being ridiculed, which in turn leads to his Krauser persona coming out more often, which leads to Krauser's popularity growing. The series explores the futile attempts of Negishi to break this vicious circle, escape his DMC persona and become a successful pop musician

A serial killer strikes fear in the hearts of residents of Hamburg during the early 1970s.

It is the year 2029: Astronaut Leo Davidson boards a pod cruiser on a Space Station on a rescue and recovery mission. But an abrupt detour through a space time wormhole lands him on a strange planet where talking apes rule over the human race. With the help of a sympathetic chimpanzee activist named Ari and a small band of human rebels, Leo leads the effort to evade the advancing Gorilla Army led by General Thade and his most trusted warrior Attar. Now the race is on to reach a sacred temple within the planet's Forbidden Zone to discover the shocking secrets of mankind's past - and the key to its future.

Heidi, the star of the "Meet The Feebles Variety Hour" discovers her lover Bletch, The Walrus, is cheating on her, and with all the world waiting for the show the assorted co-stars must contend with their own problems. These include drug addiction, extortion, robbery, disease, Drug dealing, and even murder. While this is happening the love between two of the stars is threatened by the devious Trevor the Rat, who wishes to exploit the young starlet for use in his porno movie business.

Derek and his friends must investigate the missing people in a small village. Then they find out its human formed aliens that are really big headed monsters that used all the people in the small village into their snack burgers. Now, Derek must save the day and the world with his chainsaw before the meat eaters strikes the whole planet. Will Derek kill all the aliens?

When a small town is invaded by aliens from outer space who are capturing and killing the townspeople, no one takes them seriously. Why? The aliens all look like circus clowns, use weapons that look clown like, and all have painted on smiles. Only a few of the young people in the town realize the danger and of course no one believes them. Armed with an ice cream truck they try and rescue their friends.

When a bumbling pair of employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to re-animate as they go on a rampage through Louisville, Kentucky seeking their favorite food, brains.

1985 American black comedy/zombie film directed by Dan O'Bannon

It's the first comet to buzz our planet Earth in 65 million years, and everyone seems to be celebrating its imminent arrival. Everyone except Regina Belmont, and her younger sister Samantha, two Valley Girls who care more about fashion trends than celestial phenomena. But upon daybreak, when the girls discover that they are the only residents of Los Angeles whom the comet hasn't vaporized or turned into a zombie, they would do what all Valley Girls do - they go shopping. However, with the help of a friendly truck driver, the girls save Earth and escape from flesh-eating zombies and blood-seeking scientists in hot pursuit.

A gripping story of a family in search of help for their son, Dalton, who fell into a coma after a mysterious incident in the attic. Little do they know that there is much more to this endless sleep than meets the eye as they explore the paranormal, and rediscover the past; the key to getting their son back once and for all.

English singer and songwriter, founding member of The Beatles (1940–1980)

British science fiction writer and blogger

American film director, screenwriter, and producer

As a child, Jessica Drew was bitten by a deadly spider. To save her life, her scientist father injects her with an experimental serum. The treatment is successful, but the side effects are extraordinary. Jessica develops the ability to fire concussive "venom blasts," shoot web from her body and her hearing is enhanced. Now as working as editor of Justice Magazine, Jessica Drew also battles crime as Spider-Woman.

1979–1980 American animated television series

Star Wars anthology series that will see some of the world's best anime creators bring their talent to this beloved universe.

The lives of hormonal, competitive Supes as they put their physical, sexual and moral boundaries to the test, competing for the best contracts in the best cities.

A series of shorts featuring the seedling Groot along with several new and unusual characters.

American animated streaming television shorts

Fury and Talos try to stop the Skrulls who have infiltrated the highest spheres of the Marvel Universe.

Jennifer Walters acquires Hulk-like qualities.

Genius teenage inventor Riri Williams creates the most advanced suit of armor since Iron Man.

Star Wars series that take viewers into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark-side powers in the final days of the High Republic era.

American streaming television series set in the Star Wars universe

The legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett navigates the underworld of the galaxy with mercenary Fennec Shand when they return to the sands of Tatooine to stake their claim on the territory formerly ruled by the deceased crime lord Jabba the Hutt.

Twenty years after modern civilization has been destroyed, Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey, as they both must traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.

American TV series based on the video game The Last of Us

Prequel series to Star Wars' 'Rogue One', following the adventures of Cassian Andor during the formative years of the Rebellion.

American space opera streaming television series

A 13-episode series using various acts from Cirque du Soleil shown on Bravo. Each episode has a different theme, re-imagined in an entirely new way. Filmed in Montréal in 2003.

Larissa

Robin Allen

TasteDive Official

tricky turtle

Selenio Escrito

This is a follow on from my old list (which I am no longer able to access). It's the same ol' taste but with a couple added adjectives....

An accident at a nuclear plant causes a radioactive water leak which ends up gruesomely killing a student at a nearby school after the tainted water r

1986 film by Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman, Richard W. Haines

The big-screen version of Hunter S. Thompson's seminal psychedelic classic about his road trip across Western America as he and his large Samoan lawye

A regular girl, Veronica, tries to survive the social jungle of high school by sticking with the three most popular girls at school who are all called

A drug dealer introduces one of his customers, a 'speed freak', to the man who runs the meth lab. A crazy three-day adventure ensues.

2002 crime film directed by Jonas Åkerlund

Dark / Absurd / Weird / Trippy / Mouldy Movies

movie

Drew Goldsmith

George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel—a scathing satire on a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism.“All animals ar

Namchulwoo is a poor fisherman living a simple but happy life with his wife and daughter on the north side of a river that divide s the two Korea's. E

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James Cole, a prisoner of the state in the year 2035, can earn parole if he agrees to travel back in time and thwart a devastating plague. The virus h

John Murdoch awakens alone in a strange hotel to find that he has lost his memory and is wanted for a series of brutal and bizarre murders. While tryi

Douglas Quaid is haunted by a recurring dream about a journey to Mars. He hopes to find out more about this dream and buys a holiday at Rekall Inc. wh

Hacker/arcade owner Kevin Flynn is digitally broken down into a data stream by a villainous software pirate known as Master Control and reconstituted 

Are We Real?

Carl

Original movies better than their remakes. Didn't take into account reboots nor Disney live action.

A US research station, Antarctica, early-winter 1982. The base is suddenly buzzed by a helicopter from the nearby Norwegian research station. They are

Phoenix office worker Marion Crane is fed up with the way life has treated her. She has to meet her lover Sam in lunch breaks, and they cannot get mar

Much better than the remake

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Dark / Absurd / Weird / Trippy Movies

Drew Malcolm Goldsmith

A young boy is arrested by the U.S. Secret Service for writing a computer virus and is banned from using a computer until his 18th birthday. Years later, he and his new-found friends discover a plot to unleash a dangerous computer virus, but they must use their computer skills to find the evidence while being pursued by the Secret Service and the evil computer genius behind the virus.

Thirty-something Rob Gordon, a former club DJ, owns a not-so-lucrative used record store in Chicago. He not so much employs Barry and Dick, but rather keeps them around as they showed up at the store one day and never left. All three are vinyl and music snobs, but in different ways. Rob has a penchant for compiling top-five lists. The latest of these lists is his top-five break-ups, it spurred by the fact that his latest girlfriend, Laura, a lawyer, has just broken up with him. He believed that Laura would be the one who would last, partly as an expectation of where he would be at this stage in his life. Rob admits that there have been a few incidents in their relationship which in and of themselves could be grounds for her to want to break up. To his satisfaction, Laura is not on this top-five list. Rob feels a need not only to review the five relationships, which go back as far as middle school when he was 12, and try to come to terms with why the woman, or girl as the case may be, left him, but also, in the words of Charlie Nicholson, number four on the list, "what it all means" for why he has ended up where he is, which is nowhere, personally or professionally, close to what he envisioned. He also has to come to terms with what it means that Laura has moved on to Ian Raymond, a man for whom neither had any respect when they were together.

In the Initech office, the insecure Peter Gibbons hates his job and the obnoxious Division VP Bill Lumbergh who has just hired two efficiency consultants to downsize the company. His best friends are two software engineers Michael Bolton and Samir Nagheenanajar, that also hate Initech, and his intrusive next door neighbor Lawrence. He believes his girlfriend Anne is cheating on him but she convinces Peter to visit the hypnotherapist Dr. Swanson. Peter tells how miserable his life is and Dr. Swanson hypnotizes him and he goes into a state of ecstasy. However, Dr. Swanson dies immediately after giving the hypnotic suggestion to Peter. Peter, in his new state, starts to date the waitress Joanna and changes his attitude which results in his being promoted by the consultants. When he discovers that Michael and Samir will be downsized, they decide to plant a virus in the banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation into Peter's account. However Michael commits a mistake in the software on the decimal place and they siphon off over $300 thousand. The desperate trio tries to fix the problem, return the money and avoid going to prison.

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The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.

Apparently a classic of the sci-fi cannon, I'd never heard of this book until it came up on a book club here. It took me a long time to read only because of lack of time, and a rather annoying trait the author has that I'll go into later.This is one of those books that tells us more about the period it was written in than anything else, so it's important to note that it was first published in 1961 and later again in 1968 - when moon fever was running high and people seemed to have high expectations for human achievement. Events are set in an undisclosed future but the older characters seem to remember the first moon landing, so I wouldn't be surprised if Heinlein was thinking of it being set around about now. With a mix of very daggy technology like "stereo tanks" (TVs) and large, clumsy listening devices, alongside hover crafts and spaceships to Mars, the scope of the setting is hampered by a 50s' imagination. Stranger in a Strange Land is about Michael "Mike" Smith, the "Man from Mars", offspring of two of scientists on board the original mission to Mars, who was raised by Martians. He is more Martian than human, especially in his thinking and outlook and philosophy, when he is brought back to Earth. Heir to a shitload of money care of his parents' heritage, it's unsurprising that the bigshots on Earth are wanting to keep him locked up tight. A nurse at the hospital where he is first kept, Jill, offers him a glass of water and in that one action becomes a "water brother" - the highest accolade for Mike. She rescues him from the politicians with the help of her journalist friend Ben and takes him to the home of a grumpy, reclusive man, Dr Jubal Harshaw, who lives with three young women who serve as secretaries - Anne, Miriam and Dorcas - and two men who take care of the property - Duke and Larry. Mike's particular talents slowly reveal: he can vanish things, including people, if he recognises there is a "wrongness" in them; he can withdraw from his own body and shut down his body so there is no heartbeat; he can teleport and think telepathically; he can absorb books in minutes and regulate his own body, making it muscular and mature at will; and so on. All of this can be done with understanding of the Martian language, which Jill starts to learn. He's completely ignorant of human ways, of human concepts - things like jealousy, possessiveness etc. are all alien to him. He doesn't understand religions and he has never laughed.After months on the road with just Jill, learning and "grokking", he finally knows why humans laugh and how to do it himself, and gets the human condition. It leads him to start his own "church", though it's more of a way of life open to people of all religious denominations, with free love and open mindedness, and abilities gained through mastery of the Martian language. With Mike set up as a new Messiah, a prophet, there's only one logical conclusion for this story.As a story, Stranger in a Strange Land is enjoyable and original. Yet, as a story, it's also bogged down with sermons, with Heinlein's opinions, and a very out-of-date mentality. It reads very 60s and 70s, though it was written before then. Not as far-sighted as it would like to be! It's especially noticeable in the relations between men and women, which have that faintly liberated tinge that's all really lip service, and a great deal of sexist language. Which is ironic, really, considering Mike's free love cult. There's also an affectionate insult for a Muslim character who's nicknamed "Stinky" that I couldn't help but be offended by.It does make it hard to read, though, when you come across lines like this, as spoken by Jill very matter-of-factly: "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault." (p304) While today the statistics are more like "nine of ten times, a woman's rapist is someone she knows", the idea that it's "partly her fault" is still considered true by way too many people. To hear this come out of Jill's mouth makes it especially awful.Another example is Jubal saying: "Pipe down, Anne. Close your mouth, Dorcas. This is not a time when women have the vote." (p382) Granted, they ignored him and did what they wanted anyway, but there're a lot of these flippant, dismissive remarks all through the book. Product of its times, sure: just not at all futuristic.Then we come to the proselytizing, which the book is rife with. Today, reading this book, the opinions shared are very "yes, so?" - old hat, in other words. Though it is fun to read the rants, the set-up is cringe-worthy. Jubal is the main lecturer, and the characters around him serve as props. There are a great many "Huh?"s from educated and knowledgeable people so that Jubal can share his abundant wisdom. One "huh?" is okay, but when each long paragraph of Jubal is responded to with a "huh?" it gets a bit silly. Frankly, it's bad writing. It reminded me somewhat of The Da Vinci Code, which also uses characters to expound the author's theories on religion etc. at great length. While these things did at times make it harder to read the book, essentially the book is easy to read and often quite fun too. Jubal's sermons (and when Jubal isn't around, other characters fill the role, like Ben and Sam) can be a bit heavy-handed and obvious but a lot of it I agree with, so it wasn't rubbing me up the wrong way. Mike is a challenging character to write, because in order to write a naive, ignorant character to this extent, you need to be incredibly self-aware. Heinlein has fairly good success here, and Mike's growth, maturation, development and resolutions fit the character and work. He has charisma and is definitely intriguing; yet because he lacks the human flaws, he's also somewhat unapproachable and alien: a good balance to achieve.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands. A stunning tour de force filled with transcendent awe and wonder, Hyperion is a masterwork of science fiction that resonates with excitement and invention, the first volume in a remarkable new science fiction epic by the multiple-award-winning author of The Hollow Man.

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